What is Video Email Marketing?

When you incorporate video into email marketing, you have two mediums that exist in beautiful harmony to help you achieve marketing and sales goals and improve the user experience. Emails help video gain exposure, and video improves click-through rates on your emails and increases audience engagement.

4 Advantages of Using Video in Email Marketing

As you market a product, you want to show the target audience the benefits of your products and services. Before you begin transforming your email marketing, you want to understand the benefits of incorporating video.

Improved Click-Through Rate. Regardless of the email type–newsletter, follow-up with prospects, automated alert–an email that mentions a video gets 3-4 times more click-throughs than ones that don’t.

Increased engagement. Getting people to your site is nice. Getting them to stay and engage in your content is better. Those who click through to a video spend substantially more time on your site than regular web traffic.

Finding the right message. Tracking which videos your audience watches and which part they watch will help you deliver better content. If for example, the data shows your target audience prefers how-to videos instead of videos showing the benefits of your products and services, you know what types of videos to do to increase engagement.

Better insight. The more data you collect, the more effective marketer you will become. Video allows you to collect better data. For example, if the only information you receive is who clicks through, then everyone who clicks through is equal. If, however, the data you receive identifies who clicks through, who clicks through and watches a video, and who clicks through and watches a video multiple times, then you have insight into who in your audience should be given the most attention.

Building an Audience through Email and Video

Before beginning or altering any marketing campaign or method, it is important to have specific, measurable goals, so you know whether the campaign wins or loses. Regardless of specific goals, all marketing campaigns carry the mandate to grow and build engagement with the target audience.

Compose an email that includes an attractive link to a video on your website

Send the email to your email subscriber list

Your audience shares the video or forwards the email

New viewers discover your engaging content

Your audience grows

These steps are, of course, contingent on a couple of very important factors. The most important consists of creating engaging, valuable content. If the content is not relevant and engaging to your target audience, then it will not matter how many people you send it to. The second important factor consists of having at least a small engaged email list to send it to, a list that has been created by offering valuable, engaging content to your target audience.

Identifying the Goal of Your Email

What exactly are you trying to do with the email? The most common purpose is to get people to visit your site, consume content, and share content with their sphere of influencers.

If your goal is expanding your audience and encouraging conversions, certain email and video tactics work better than others.

Tell recipients there’s a video. You can mention the video in the email subject line, in the text of the email, or with a video thumbnail that includes a play button. The easier it is for the recipient to see there’s a video, the more likely they will engage and click through.

Choose an enticing thumbnail from the video to show in the email. Friendly faces entice clicks.

Link the thumbnail to a page on your website. You should have a play button on your thumbnail. The play button will get viewers to click. Clicking on the thumbnail should not play the video. Instead, it should link to a page on your website that contains the video. Unlike a video playing within an email (which can encounter all sorts of technical issues), a video playing on a company website is surrounded by complementary elements that strengthen the company’s brand.

Keep the number of calls-to-action limited. You have a high-quality, engaging video. Your goal is to get people to click on it and watch. Stay focused.

HARNESS is a team of digital marketing innovators with a unique focus on inbound marketing combined with video marketing. Whether as a complement to your content marketing team or as your entire marketing department, HARNESS consistently generates leads and drives sales through engaging marketing content.